Smith didn't mean to trivialize discrimination of others in remarks about unvaccinated, she says

New Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she didn't mean to downplay discrimination against minority communities when she said unvaccinated people have received the worst discrimination of any group in more than 50 years. 

"I want to be clear that I did not intend to trivialize in any way the discrimination faced by minority communities and other persecuted groups both here in Canada and around the world or to create any false equivalencies to the terrible historical discrimination and persecution suffered by so many minority groups over the last decades and centuries," she wrote in a statement. 

"I am committed to listening, learning and addressing the issues affecting minority communities." 

The statement says her office will be setting up meetings to help her better understand what those communities are facing — and that Canadians need to work together to end all discrimination. 

On Tuesday, during Smith's first hours as Alberta's premier, she said people who didn't get COVID-19 vaccines faced the most discrimination.

"They have been the most discriminated against group that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime," she said. 

"This has been an extraordinary time, in the last year in particular, and I want people to know that I find that unacceptable."

She promised during the United Conservative Party leadership race that if elected she would amend the Alberta Human Rights Act to add vaccination status as a grounds subject to protection from discrimination, the way race, sexual orientation and religion are currently protected. 

Smith said she knows society broadly was working to get to a high level of vaccination, but now it's time to treat the virus as endemic, similar to influenza. 

Tuesday's comments led to widespread backlash against the premier from political critics, community leaders and a fellow premier. 

"She has marginalized and overlooked the trauma, the ongoing harm, the discrimination, the racism [against] First Nations peoples. And we were here before there was an Alberta, so we have been fighting a long battle," Rachel Snow, an Indigenous legal scholar and member of the Stoney Nakoda Nations, told CBC News.

Alberta's last residential school wasn't closed until the 1990s.

Opposition NDP Leader Rachel Notley called Smith's comments "completely disrespectful and tone deaf in light of all the work we are collectively committing to with respect to truth and reconciliation."

"I felt it in my stomach and my heart sank and I thought, 'Here we go again, we're going to have to defend our right to be here," said Anila Lee Yuen, the CEO of the Centre for Newcomers in Calgary.